1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information storage medium, and more particularly, to an information storage medium using nanocrystal particles, a method of manufacturing the information storage medium, and an information storage apparatus including the information storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In hard disk drives (HDDs) which are widely used as main storage apparatuses of computers, information is read or written by levitating a write/read head above an information storage medium while the information storage medium is rotated. In such HDDs, a magnetic recording method is generally used. That is, in a conventional HDD, a plurality of magnetic domains magnetized in a first direction and an opposite direction (hereinafter, a second direction) to the first direction are formed using a magnetic field, and the magnetic domains magnetized in the first and second directions respectively correspond to data values of ‘0’ and ‘1’. Recording density of a HDD that uses the magnetic recording method has rapidly increased in the last few decades. However, due to a superparamagnetic effect, it is difficult to achieve recording densities of 500 Gb/in2 or higher.
Therefore, to overcome the above limit of recording density, various solutions such as patterned media, heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), ferroelectric storage media, or probe recording have recently been suggested. However, none of these techniques are currently economically viable.